I don’t know about your area, but in the fall there are a few estate sales that sell those plastic bag greenhouse thingys. I get them every year for $1 and then throw them out after a few years. They hold up to the weather really well but I also use 30 stakes (Coat hangers) to anchor them vs the 4 they come with.
The racks can be reused when I throw the greenhouses out too.
This year was nothing but medical issues with my wife and I - So I did NOTHING in the garden this year but mow it over. Previous attempts to grow indoors yielded nothing. I had healthy plants that never bloomed or yielded.
This year I actually sat down and did one of the PVC pipe designs. Cost about $80 and took about 10 hours from start to finish.
But while it was my broken (Shattered, really) knee that took me down, my wife was diagnosed with severe, life-threatening Crohn’s. We also found out that our daughter is susceptible to the disease so we had to truly sit down and budget out some kind of fix, regardless of how hard it hit.
2019 is the year for Food security for me and my family.
Oh no! I’m so sorry to hear all that. Our issue is strictly financial and the medical issues are just that obamacare has destroyed our finances :(
I’ve got some plastic tarp hubby scrounged somewhere and we use t-posts with cut off drink bottles over the end to ‘cushion’ the edge so things don’t tear and make our own low tunnels that way. I had bell peppers the week or maybe two weeks after thanksgiving here one year. fully a month and change after the first freeze.
Do please keep us updated on your experiments/etc. That’s definitely something we want to try to get a good supply of winter greens w/o having to worry about covering/uncovering a low tunnel.